4 sided pages in book printing?

[John Sgammato]

Hi, Theresa - 
I am darkening my grayest neurons developing my first EDD for structure Frame, so I may miss something, but here are my thoughts:
I think you may be overmanaging your project, unaware of inexpensive external resources that can save you time and stress. 
I do a lot of docs, and almost all of them are printed 5.5" x 8.5" on US Letter sized paper (to get 4pp from a sheet with no waste). The books are printed, covered, bound, and shrinkwrapped into docsets at a local Alphagraphics printshop for a very competitive price.They handle all the bizarre imposition needs and it always comes out right. I give them a PDF and they give me books and no problems. 
I do not go to lower-end printshops, because I have been burned in the past by the printer's inexperience. It is important to be sure the printer understands what you need, and what can go wrong. It is also important to get a well-established printer that does not see a lot of employee turnover, and to establish a personal relationship. It takes a little while to do the training, but it is worth it. 
I also do some 4pp end-user docs, little things designed to be printed in house, but they never go more than 4pp so imposition is not an issue. 
If the reason for in-house printing is thrift, I urge you to check out your friendly local print shops. You may find the cost of reprographic/Docutech printing is much lower than you expect for a short print run.
I'll be happy to follow a new thread about small-company printing issues with those who are considering printing their docs, or who have too much trouble printing them.  Our VP Marketing told me three years ago he would fight the idea of having printed docs, but three yearslater he is CEO, I am still writing, and we just got our second 5-star review in Secure Computing that explicitly mentioned the printed docs...
john

________________________________

From: Theresa de Valence [mailto:tdevalence at bstw.com]
Sent: Wed 3/22/2006 3:35 PM
To: Frame Users
Subject: 4 sided pages in book printing?



Hello Framers and John (because I like your answers to other peoples'
questions!):

I am just getting around to setting up my first book to print
semi-automatically on legal paper from a regular office printer (later
to be converted into 5.5" x 8.5" pages). Up until now I have created
such documents by manually selecting where each article would print on
which page. I would now like to set up the book so that this is a more
automated process.

So far, these are the issues which I must resolve along with my guess at
the right way to do it:

1. The pages are really Outside Left, Outside Right, Inside Left and
Inside Right. During the first half of the book, the pages are Outside
Right, followed by Inside Left, followed by Outside Right. For the
second half of the book, the pages are Inside Right, followed by Outside
Left, and on.

I could achieve this with para tags, where I only have to decide where
50% of the book is.

2. The format of these 4 pages is really 2: a page on the left side of
the paper and a page on the right side of the paper. For logic's sake, I
can call them 4 different page names, but they occupy exactly the same
frame position in relation to the paper.

3. How does the physical printing device know that pages 10 and 15 print
on one side of the legal sheet and pages 9 and 16 print on the other?

I have a feeling this is achieved with Flow, but I can't quite figure
out how.

Help is appreciated.

Regards,
Theresa